Besides the luminaire cutoff, there is also light reflected from the Earth. It can be low for a luminaire above an area of mud, or very high above fresh snow...
And this depends to a large extent on the light quantity in general, including light that is directed down from the luminaire
And this depends on trends, that could go both ways :
1. Old lighting setups tend to have lower light levels that were deemed acceptable at the time, and new lighting setups tend to over illuminate the area, often under claims of improving safety or "higher standards" in general
2. As LED lighting is not more efficient than HPS, the only way to use LEDs to fulfill arbitrary energy saving goals, is to cut down on the light levels when doing a LED conversion. This results also in cutting down on the sky glow levels
Old lighting used very inefficient optics, so a lot of the light did not contribute to the desired illumination level, but just became light pollution.
Plus lights were designed with assuming very significant output degradation, so in order to meet the requirement at their end of life, the average output had to be way higher.
And LEDs benefit mainly from the possibility of accurate beam control and rather strict standard for lifetime output reduction (strictly 70%, for other light sources the EOL output was anticipated somewhere between 50 to 30%).
And with LEDs, there is quite strong purchase cost related push to install only the output really needed. And not many times higher as was the case with many HID from the last 20..30 years.
Plus there is wider selection of LED outputs, so an installation could be more accurately designed.
But all that depends if the one designing the installation and specifying the exact fixtures to be used does his homework properly of if it goes as a lazy quickie... Unfortunately the later seems to be the case way too often.
